James Howard Kunstler

My friends, who humor me more than I deserve, have listened to me invoke the name of James Howard Kunstler for years. He is the Ron Paul of Peak Oil obsessives. While I'm not a PO crackpot, it's clear to me that there is plenty of reason to be wary of what an oil deprived world may bring. There's no disputing that there is a limited volume of easily accessible petroleum in the world, which combined with an insatiable appetite for the stuff, will lead to convulsive social and political upheaval throughout the industrialized world if we don't manage to ween ourselves off it. Unfortunately, Kunstler makes a convincing case for why that will not be easy, and why we'll have to transform in very fundamental ways who we are as a society and what we should desire as individuals. His op-ed in the Washington Post makes for a good introduction to what his argument is.